Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The Cassandra complex

A few weeks ago a Scottish commission determined that the Libyan man convicted of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice". But this was no newsat all to those who'd been paying attention to the facts and ignoring the US's transparently opportunistic flip-flopping and posturing on this issue.

Just recently Nir Rosen appeared on CNN and gave a remarkably detailed and pointed description of how the US and Israel fomented the civil war in Gaza, leading CNN hairbot John Roberts to respond incredulously with "Nir, I mean what are you talking about" and conclude the interview dismissively with "Well, there's definitely a lot of different opinions on what's going on. Nir Rosen with one of them." Yes, John, there's [sic] a lot of opinions--and there are also a lot of facts, like the ones that you just heard and rejected so superciliously.

When the US was attacked on 9/11, many of us understood exactly why it had happened. But the official catechism that "they hate us for our freedoms" has become so entrenched that when someone like Ron Paul speaks the simple truth, they're greeted with that same kind of disbelief and dismissiveness.

In the months before the US attack on Iraq, the Bush administration made a new claim on almost a daily basis that was either contradicted by readily available evidence or simply outright false. For those who were paying attention, that is; for the media and for the public at large nearly every claim was treated as received truth, and the wealth of counter evidence was ignored or (at best) minimized to the point of effective nonexistence.

This all comes back to something I realized years ago when I started becoming much more politically active and aware (after a long period as a relatively apolitical liberal and standard-issue Democrat): as a progressive, you gain an immense amount of knowledge that's clear, logical, and supported by a mountain of facts...but which is also completely outside of the realm of standard discourse in everyday society. You start to feel like Cassandra--doomed to know what's going on without having anyone believe it (I don't know how many times I've heard "well, yes, if that's true" from someone I knew would never make the effort to verify it for themselves).

It's simultaneously gratifying to feel that you've begun to understand the world a little better and frustrating to know that that understanding puts you in a marginalized, demonized minority. And it's only exacerbated by the fact that there's no profound knowledge or penetrating insight involved; it's all very basic stuff. The same information is readily available to anyone else as well, if only they'd look past the layers of official obfuscation to see it...or if only they even realized that there was anything there to see at all.